John Wilder: Senate icon, one of a kind

The General Assembly will never be the same following the retirement of a unique lawmaker from the rural community of Mason

The retirement of state Sen. John Wilder later this year will signal the end of an era in Tennessee politics and create a wide-open race in his West Tennessee district for the first time in decades.

Wilder, an 86-year-old Democrat of the old school, represented all or parts of Chester, Crockett, Fayette, Hardeman, Hardin, Haywood, McNairy and Wayne counties from 1959 to 1960, returned to the post in 1966 and eventually worked his way to the status of institutional icon.

Every two years from 1971 through 2005, he was elected by his colleagues to Senate speaker and lieutenant governor, allowing him to serve longer than any other presiding officer of a state or federal legislative body in the United States.

An enigmatic and colorful personality whose cryptic language and obscure parables left listeners bewildered, he was best known for the bipartisan coalition he forged in order to maintain his hold on the gavel for so long.

His career was not without flaws, as when he worked under the radar in 1997 to pass an important piece of legislation that suspended Tennessee's general municipal annexation and incorporation laws for a year, allowing communities near existing cities to incorporate. The so-called &quot;tiny towns&quot; legislation was later thrown out by the Tennessee Supreme Court.

He also turned in a disappointing performance in 2005 when corrupt legislators were arrested in an FBI sting -- the Tennessee Waltz case -- and his response was to criticize the government's tactics.

Wilder was an important ally of public education in Tennessee, however, and an instinctive politician with a talent for getting things done. He was an architect of the Tennessee Plan, a method of selecting justices for the Tennessee appellate courts that has a number of advantages over the direct election process.

His courage and fairness were demonstrated early when, as Fayette County agribusinessman, he supported 1960s-era voter registration drives among African-American sharecroppers and broke ranks with the local white establishment by refusing to cancel crop loans made to black families.

A year ago Wilder was hospitalized after a fall, and that, combined with the loss of the speaker's post to Republican Ron Ramsey, raised speculation about how much longer the great-grandfather would continue to serve.

But he continued to pilot his own twin-engine Piper back and forth between his Fayette County home and the capital, was still seen riding his bicycle around town, and lent his campaign kitty $500,000 in what appeared to be a run up to another re-election campaign.

So it was an emotional moment last week in the Senate for colleagues of this quintessential Southern lawmaker when he said he would not stand for another term. Wilder rose from the cotton fields of West Tennessee to sit at the table with a long succession of governors, legislative colleagues and lobbyists to hatch a thousand compromises and made sure that the wheels of government continued to turn. It's no exaggeration to say that he is one of a kind.